The main objective is a double one. First and foremost, it is a question of showing that foot-in-the-door as a proven behavioral influence technique in offline interactions maintains its efficiency in online interactions. It is then a question of exploring the impact of the anthropomorphism vs. the non-anthropomorphism of the requester avatar on the efficiency of this technique. Foot-in-the-door is based on a simple principle: you start by asking for a little in a first step to increase the probability of obtaining a lot in a second step. The research was conducted in the Second Life virtual world. In a control condition (n = 200), a requester avatar directly proposed the target request. In a foot-in-the-door condition (n = 200), the requester avatar started by presenting a preparatory request before proposing the target request. According to the conditions, the requester avatar was human-like (female or male), or non-human-like (flower, balloon, cube). As expected, our results show that overall the foot-in-the door-technique remains efficient in the virtual world; they also show that this efficiency depends on the human-like form of the requester avatar. This last result is interpreted as a reference to the theory of social presence. Non-human-like avatars could generate a weak social presence, to the point where the mechanisms of self-perception and commitment underlying the foot-in-the-door effect may not be automatically initiated. Player avatars would in this way be freed from the rules of social interaction occurring in offline interactions.
The aim of the two studies was to explore a new dissonance paradigm-expressive dissonance-based on the inconsistency between what people feel and what people express behaviorally. Expressive dissonance was aroused by asking participants to watch a film with a high emotional content, either positive (joy) or negative (sadness). In the no-dissonance condition, they received the instruction to naturally watch the film. In the expressive dissonance condition, they received the instruction to facially express emotions that were the opposite of what they felt. We expected that the expressive dissonance situation would: 1) require cognitive resources leading to a decrease in cognitive performance (studies 1 and 2); 2) be accompanied by emotional regulation strategies (study 1); 3) be accompanied by an increase in dissonance-related affects (study 2). Although our results (studies 1 and 2) corroborated those obtained previously in terms of performance, they also showed that participants in the expressive dissonance situation use emotional regulation strategies: exaggeration and suppression (study 1), and that they felt self-directed negative affects (study 2), just like the participants in a cognitive dissonance situation. These first results allowed us to establish a theoretical bridge between the theories of emotions-particularly those related to the emotional regulation processes-and to widen the scope of relevance of the dissonance theory.
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